d the point where an important
question confronts us,--a question not wholly new. Within the memory of
living men theologians have been compelled to ask themselves: What if
the geologists should establish facts that contradict our Biblically
derived doctrine that the universe was made in a week? Again have they
been constrained to put to themselves the question: What if the
evolutionists should supersede our doctrine that the creation is the
immediate product of successive fiats of the Creator by showing that it
came gradually into existence through the progressive operation of
forces immanent in the cosmos? Still again have they had to face the
question: What if modern criticism by the discovery of demonstrable
errors in the Sacred Writings should fault our doctrine that, as the
Word of God, the Bible is free from all and every error? In every
instance the dreaded concession, when found at length to be enforced by
modern learning, has been found to bring, not the loss that had been
apprehended, but clear gain to the intellectual interests of religion.
Now it is this same sort of question which returns with the
uncertainties and difficulties widely felt in the Church to be gathering
over its hitherto unvexed belief in miracles as signs of a divine
activity more immediate than it has recognized in the regular processes
of Nature.

The majority of uneducated Christians still hold, as formerly in each of
the points just mentioned, to the traditional view. Miracle as a divine
intervention in the natural order, a more close and direct divine
contact with the course of things than is the case in ordinary
experience, they regard as the inseparable and necessary concomitant and
proof of a divine Revelation. To deny miracles, thus understood, is
censured as equivalent to denial of the reality of the Revelation. But
it is rather surprising, because it is rare, to find a man of such note
in literature as Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll affirming[35] that one cannot
be a Christian without believing at least two miracles, the virgin
birth and the physical resurrection of the Christ. Without comment on
the significance of this retreat upon the minimum of miracle, it must
here be noted that a minority of the Church, not inferior to their
brethren in learning and piety, believe that there are no tides in God's
presence in Nature, that his contact with it is always of the closest:--

"Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands or f